Carrie Mae Weems- „I…insert myself as the narrator of history.”

„One of the ways in which I measure whether or not someone is really being successful is to the extent that their work is allowed to really circulate broadly throughout American culture. To that extent it’s a very circumspect and very confined territory that Black artists occupy. We’re certainly not considered a part of the cannon, the great canon of American artistic practice. When we look at the great movements in art, whether it’s abstract expressionism or modernism or impressionism or cubism or constructivism, we’re not a part of those movements. We’re not seen as part of those aspects of invention so to that extent, you’re always marginalized because you’re not considered part of the group of people who really had a hand in the shaping of quote, ‘serious artistic practice.’ So, you know, when your work comes up for auction, it’s not considered a part of the major cannon, it’s like this derivative practice. So you might spend a couple hundred thousand for it but you would never spend $10 million for it. Basquiat is in the million-dollar range but he’s sort of like the anomaly and he’s still not the commodity that Warhol is or any of the other practitioners that came along with Basquiat at that moment right. His auction price sort of tells you how he’s really considered in the grand scheme of things next to those people that are considered major. So my great humiliation is that the work is always considered in light of the bigger cannon and in that sense I’m just small potatoes.

I’m not trying to give up my Blackness so that I can be an artist. I’m interested in my Blackness being considered a part of the greater humanity like whiteness. If we assume that when we talk about de Kooning, we assume that de Kooning is speaking to all of us even though he’s painting white people. Why can’t my ‘Kitchen Table’ series stand for more than the Black woman who’s in the picture? Why does it have to be considered less than Cindy Sherman’s films do? It’s still considered less than those things because of this sort of changing same, because it was made by a Black person and Black people still are not completely taken seriously in the same way for their production. And I can’t think of the person who’s really surpassed that or surmounted that yet in any serious way. And certainly not as a group.” Carrie Mae Weems

„Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship with music, sometimes it needs all three and become a video projection.”

.”Regarding the performative nature of her work, Rob Storr writes, in the catalog to the exhibition, that “The artist herself is the pivotal figure in the scenes she stages. Indeed, like a moving-picture auteur, she is the director, set designer, costumer, and star of her own unmoving pictures. By stepping in and out of multiple roles in a manner that only the most inattentive view could miss, she signals not only her complete authorial control over every aspect of her production–but her frank admission that nothing is natural, least of all the part she plays as omnicent conjurer.”